Vital information

Grand Theft Auto - how it started out for Tempest

It started out merely as a name I started to really hear about a lot in 2004, when San Andreas came out. I already played Vice City once and only once in the past and found that the open sandbox concept was simply amazing, but I couldn't get this at home yet, as I had yet to buy a PS2. In 2004, with one in the room ready to play, I bought the game few months after it came out. GTA San Andreas was displaying a rather rapper-gangsta story I wasn't particularly fond of (being more of a rock/metalhead than anything else), but I thoroughly enjoyed the storyline as a whole and the tons of fun of discovering a huge world, three cities and all the countryside around. GTA San Andreas has, dare I say it, changed my way of seeing and treating video games, and has changed certain aspects of my life on the long run (for example, it gave the hobby of walking alone in cities, just for the sake of discovering and self-orientation, instead of taking routinely a bus or a car).

Since GTA SA came out, I became an instant fan of the series and started buying and playing more in-depth the other games. So far, I own SA on PS2 and PC, as well as Vice City, and Vice City Stories on PS2. I owned Liberty City Stories for PS2 before, but being the second GTA I bought after SA, I found it was a MASSIVE downhill from San Andreas (they removed my planes and my swimming ability? NOOOOO). I have also discovered and utterly enjoyed GTA IV on 360 at a cousin's. For one thing, my deepest regret at the moment is my inability to play GTA IV, nor on a console (don't own any of them) or on PC (not powerful enough machine to run it properly). It is sad especially knowing IV is very high in my heart as the GTA with the deepest characters and storyline I've ever played so far (I have yet to test EFLC, but I'm sure I would love them too...)

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas - More than a game

Quite frankly, GTA SA is the best creation Rockstar Games gifted us with and for many reasons, but the most important reason is probably how easy it is to modify, tweak, and crank the game in many, many ways. This game introduced me to modding, and it introduced me to MANY types of modding. Think about it, from your regular vehicle modification, to a whole new world thanks to Total Conversions, going through weapons, handling modifications, new models and textures, CLEO scripts, even multiplayer online play, the list goes on forever. The only thing you can't change is the engine's physics, and that's probably what most people who play SA but can't play IV right now, or just plain like SA more, are regretting. The closest to this is ragdoll animations, but that's just an imitation.

At first I had only rudimentary knowledge of what modding was. Having acquired the PC game in 2006, I was only tweaking with vehicles so far, and I had trouble comprehending why the game would crash sometimes, which infuriated me at first. With experience, new kinds of mods tested and tried, I started to understand that "with great power comes great responsibility" : the more mods I use, the more I should be expecting game crashes. That must be the motto of game developers, but in one sense, it's a way for me to feel like one. Personally, I find that this simple fact, that people can create mods for this game of any kind, can make them feel like they have power over this game as more than players, and this is one of the main reasons I consider SA to be still very popular, on equal terms if not more so than IV-era games.

Grand Theft Auto and Touhou - An pairing more crack than any other

In 2008, I have discovered that Japanese modders love this game. That was about at the same time I discovered Touhou Project, an extremely popular series of shoot'em up games with a TON of characters, who apparently each have their own personality and charisma despite, for many of them, being only one-timers in their respective games. Not surprisingly, Touhou is subject to a SHIT TON of memes, trends, and stuff, to a point one would wonder why it's not well known in the West.

As I discovered, Touhou has found its way in EVERYTHING. Touhou has parodied a truckload of things, one would wonder if there is anything Touhou hasn't done. More so than the Simpsons, but from an eastern point of view. Unsurprisingly, as Japanese found GTA San Andreas and found out how easy it is to mod it in many ways, their best heads started to make Touhou mods. Being a huge fan of both series, I started in 2009 to collect mods related on them. This started to be known as what is Touhou GTA or TGTA to make it short, as I do often when I speak about it.

Being two completely different worlds - one being a world of magitech in a Feudal-Japan-era setting with FAIRLY (understatement) colorful things (just watch ONE gameplay video of one of the games- any of them, and you will see), and the other being a world talking about our world of nowadays, from a criminal's point of view, those two worlds surely wouldn't be related to each other in any way, and one would think trying to pair the two isn't a good idea.

Well, thanks to CLEO scripters, model and texture modders, and a few fan-artists, those who thought so are WRONG.

Actual ingame screenshots? I make a ton of them. I love taking shots during my gameplays, and I could post some almost every day. In fact, making good shots of my gameplays became somewhat of a side hobby along playing, as a way to immortalize my experiences, failures, odd situations, and so on. Being a heavy mod user, don't be surprised to see an IV HUD, modded cars, and so on. It's shots of my personal game.

I currently have found nearly all the characters, save for the old PC-98 era ones, as skins, and thanks to Ryosuke's Skin Selector I could play as any of them. My favorite of all is a modification of Sanae Kochiya's skin clad in an outfit reminiscent of Naked Snake's (Big Boss), in Metal Gear Solid 3 (she earned an affectionate nickname of Snakae due to this, although her official "name" is "nekkido sanae", or "Naked Sanae".)

Here are a few samples, displaying various mods, skins, and situations, from random fighting to funnier stuff.